Snakes!

Knowing that rivers are a significant motif and play an important role in this book (especially one in particular) something thing that really struck me in the reading (pages 3-21) was the comparison of the river to a snake: “But there was one river especially… resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land… The snake charmed me” (9). Conrad continues to refers to the river and calls it a snake a few times, and later gives an eerie description of the river: “…in and out of rivers, streams of life and death, whose banks were rotting to mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair” (16). This imagery of “slime” and writhing and contortion reminds one of a snake. The reference and comparison of the river to a snake is significant in that snakes have strong connotations of being enticing, seductive, and fascinating, but also of being, deadly and poisonous, and associated with evil. I think that this could very well be foreshadowing, and definitely sets tone for the rest of the book.